Head of a Clown, 1947

Head of a Clown is one of the paintings acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2013. It was painted in 1947, a number of years after Edwin stopped regarding himself as a Surrealist, but it's not difficult to detect the influence of his surrealist phase! It's works like this that prompted Patrick Elliott, senior curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, to comment:

"They are impressive because they are inexplicable; I've not seen anything quite like them before. He's got nothing in common with anyone painting in Scotland at the time - or in fact anywhere else."